Plausible vs PostHog

Plausible

Lightweight, privacy-friendly web analytics

Plausible Analytics is a privacy-first, open-source web analytics tool that reports traffic without cookies, without persistent identifiers, and without cross-site or cross-device tracking, which means a site running it needs no cookie banner for analytics. The problem it solves is that Google Analytics is heavy, complicated, and legally awkward in Europe. Plausible states its script is 54 times smaller than Google Analytics, so every visitor downloads 135KB less JavaScript. The dashboard is a single page rather than a reporting suite: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, top sources, top pages, countries, devices, and goals, all visible without building a report. The code is public and auditable on GitHub, and you can run it yourself if you prefer not to use the hosted service. Data residency is a deliberate selling point. Plausible is made and hosted in the EU, and states that data is processed exclusively on servers owned and operated by European companies and never leaves the EU. Pricing starts with a 30-day free trial that does not require a credit card. At the 10,000 monthly pageview level, Starter is $9/month or $108/year and covers 1 site with 3-year data retention, the dashboard, email and Slack reports, Google Analytics import, goals, segments, and annotations. Growth is $14/month or $168/year and adds up to 3 sites, up to 3 team members, team management, shared links, embedded dashboards, and shared segments. Business is $19/month or $228/year and adds up to 10 sites, up to 10 team members, 5-year retention, custom properties, the Stats API at 600 requests per hour, a Looker Studio connector, revenue attribution, and funnels. Enterprise is custom-quoted for more than 10 sites or 10 team members and adds higher API limits, SSO, a managed proxy, raw data exports, and priority support. Annual billing on every paid tier works out to two months free. Who it is for: indie founders, small SaaS teams, bloggers, and agencies who want to know where traffic comes from and which pages convert, and who do not want to run a consent flow or explain a data processing agreement to a customer. How it compares: Google Analytics 4 is free and far more powerful for ad attribution and audience building, and remains the right choice if you buy paid media at scale. Fathom Analytics is the closest direct competitor with near-identical positioning. Matomo offers more depth and a mature self-hosted product, at the cost of a heavier install. PostHog covers analytics plus session replay and feature flags, which is more tool than most content sites need. Plausible wins on simplicity, page weight, and the absence of a cookie banner, and loses whenever you need advertising attribution or deep cohort analysis. Choose it if your analytics question is "what is working" rather than "model my funnel across six ad platforms".

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, session replay, and feature flags

PostHog is an open-source product platform that bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experimentation, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into one tool, available as cloud or self-hosted. The problem it targets is stack sprawl. A typical product team wires up Mixpanel or Amplitude for analytics, LaunchDarkly for feature flags, FullStory or Hotjar for session replay, Sentry for errors, and Typeform for surveys - five contracts, five SDKs, five sets of user identities that do not join up. PostHog's bet is that these are all the same data, so they belong in one product where you can watch the session replay of the user who dropped out of the funnel, behind the feature flag you shipped last week. Pricing is usage-based with a large free tier, and PostHog states that more than 90% of its customers use it for free. The monthly free tier resets every month and applies on every plan, including paid ones: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1 million data warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline events, 100,000 AI observability events, and 10 GB of ingested logs. No credit card is required, and the free plan includes 1 project, 1-year data retention, unlimited team members, and a choice of US (Virginia) or EU (Frankfurt) hosting. Past the free tier, pricing is per unit and the rate falls with scale. Product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event for the first 1-2 million events beyond the free tier, dropping through $0.0000343 (2-15 million), $0.0000295 (15-50 million), $0.0000218 (50-100 million), $0.0000150 (100-250 million), to $0.0000090 per event above 250 million. Adding a card also raises the account to 6 projects, 7-year data retention, and email support. Per-product billing limits can be set so a traffic spike cannot produce a surprise invoice. Who it is for: engineering-led product teams, especially at startups, who would rather instrument once and get five tools than integrate five vendors. Self-hosting suits teams with data residency constraints, though PostHog's EU cloud region covers most of that need without the operational burden. How it compares: Mixpanel and Amplitude are more refined as pure analytics products and are the better choice if analytics is all you need. LaunchDarkly is a stronger standalone feature-flag platform with more governance. Sentry is a better error tracker. PostHog rarely wins any single category head-to-head - it wins on consolidation, price at low volume, and the fact that the tools share one user identity. Evaluate it when you are about to buy your third point solution.